The present invention relates to the field of information technology, including, more particularly, to systems and techniques for backing up and restoring data.
A backup or the process of backing up is making copies of data which may be used to restore the original after a data loss event. Examples of data loss events include data deletion or corruption (e.g., natural disasters, fire, floods, earthquake, human error, software bugs, hardware failure, or software viruses). Backups may also be used to recover data from an earlier time.
Making backups, however, can involve significant resources and time. For example, running a backup process can interfere with normal operations, there can be a performance impact on the system being backed up. For example, for the period of time that a computer system is being backed up, the hard drive is busy reading files for the purpose of backing up, and its full bandwidth is no longer available for other tasks. Backups across a network can affect network bandwidth.
Thus, there is a need to provide systems and techniques to increase the efficiency of data backup and recovery systems.